Supreme Court: first amendment allows mature video games to be sold to minors
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I was in an ethics discussion in my military surgical program and started to see how the effects of these policies. Full disclosure: a number of my friends have died in the current conflicts, starting with the Pentagon on 9/11. One of the situations we were posed with, by staff who were there, was this:
CIA officers approach you, as a doctor, in Kandahar, with a captured informant-turned-double-agent. They want you to give him Ativan so he'll talk. They tell you he knows where a weapons cache is that could be used against Americans. You say no, there's no medical indication. They say, if you don't, they'll torture him and get the information anyway. You're role will only cause him more pain or less.
The overwhelming consensus of medical students, interns, and residents was to give him the Ativan. Three of us took the opposite position: you can't let people cajole you into making moral decisions based on threats. Then your just complicit.
The irony was that the majority consisted of essentially everyone who hadn't thought about these problems before. In the minority of three were two of us with prior service, and the philosophy major.
Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. It's just shit. I don't care if it points in the right direction or the wrong direction. I, your comrade in arms, don't know where it's going to point next time. And that's not the guy I want be sharing a tent with.
So enjoy your expanded access to an audience willing to pretend they understand violence. Moral consistency matters. Reliability matters. You can look forward to further international embarrassment when they grow up to make the wrong, randomly wrong, decisions behind the trigger or, worse, at the voting booth.
Edit: Look, I'm all for the first amendment. I took an oath to defend it, and I carry a copy of the Constitution with me everywhere. I read it regularly. Genuinely, I support the ideas in the opinion. My concern is that waiting in the wings around this particular opinion, there's a lot of unscrupulous adults salivating over the opportunity to take money from my kids in exchange for making my job as a parent, doctor, military officer, etc, harder.
Edit 2: For those asking for evidence: here is the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement on Media Violence, which includes abundant (3500) references if you would like to dig deeper: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...
Preview of that statement: "The strength of the correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior found on meta-analysis is greater than that of calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection, or environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer."
Edit 3: I would like to point out that here is a thread full of programmers justifying, essentially to themselves, why their industry is best off with less regulation. Do you extend your arguments to other industries gray areas? Meat processing? Tobacco? Defense? Isn't "corporate self-regulation" best for everyone?
I just interviewed a CS grad from a great school with 10 years experience who could barely write a line of code let alone do something useful for my company. The village didn't do him much good from where I sit.
Combine that with the coercion of government and you have a strong attraction for such "leaders".
But not a government.
We can raise our children just fine without a nanny state.
Alternatively any group of humans above the Dunbar number will be constrained to use blunt rule based systems, but below that you can take the circumstances and the persons involved into account.
It fascinates me that people think the government is some kind of replacement for the village. I grew up in a community. The community gave me access to many things but never coerced me to participate. I chose what I wanted to do.
What kind of childhood did you have where you think the same people that require you to act a certain way at the threat of violence should be your saviours?
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...
Violent media is not the problem.
Games in particular would be easy for younger kids to get if they knew an older kid who could buy them. When I was 18 I would have bought anyone a game because I like games and don't seem them as harmful. Maybe that isn't the best thing to do (I wouldn't do it now probably) but I definitely would have done it at that age.
At what point do we decide that someone is 'mature' enough to play a violent videogame? Is it a different age than when we think they could use drugs 'responsibly' (in a world where they were legal)? A more obvious example would be alcohol. I would let my children (n.b. I do not currently have children) play a violent videogame, but I would not let them drink a six pack. I see the drugs/alcohol as putting them more in direct physical harm (most likely where they would hurt themselves, or overdose, etc.) than violent videogames. People thankfully can't overdose on violent videogames (except the people who died in Korean internet cafes playing WoW, but I think that's a different topic altogether).
Given that someone can't physically hurt themselves with a violent videogame, I would allow a much younger child access to them than I would drugs or alcohol. We could argue whether or not there is any mental/emotional damage, but I think we can agree that whatever mental/emotional damage there could be from playing violent videogames at the age of 12 as much as one wants, it would be much less than the mental/emotional damage of letting a 12 year old have unlimited access to drugs.
(Note I have raised children who now range in age from 30 to 11, so I have dealt with things like this for a few years)
I am cautiously in favor of people selling a video game as you described to whomever they wish. Or not selling, if they have moral qualms about it.
I am not in favor of my 12 year-old son playing a game such as you describe.
You do see the difference between a parent making a reasonable and informed choice, and having it made for them?
hey want you to give him the Ativan
I am not a doctor, this is a question honestly asked. Wiki claims Ativan is not addictive for short-term use.
From my POV, you give the guy the stuff to relax his inhibitions, he spills the beans. Or you don't and some deniable non-Americans torture him for the same information.
Can you explain your thinking on this? If not, that's cool, but I am honestly curious.
video games develop a shitty moral compass.
That they do. But that's why we have parents.
I'm not worried about addiction. I'm worried about the slippery slope of becoming complicit in cooperating with people who engage in torture.
> But that's why we have parents
So, you'd rather make their job harder?
Thank you.
>> But that's why we have parents
> So, you'd rather make their job harder?
It's not my place to make another parent's job hard. Or easy.
I don't expect or want the government to tell me what my kids can, and cannot see. That's my job, my burden. It's what I signed on for when I had kids and got married.
The issue is that giving someone drugs without their knowledge or consent is akin to rape. Especially when you're talking about a drug that's fairly dangerous.
Why? When a rape victim commits suicide, is that somehow worse than when someone who was dosed with drugs without their knowledge or consent commits suicide? E.g. Alan Turing, Frank Olson, etc.
I too think that the metaphor sucks, not because one would be worse than the other, but because I don't think they can be compared. One is mostly physical, partially emotional intrusion, the other is intellectual... They are both about the most shitty things that can happen. You can only hope that the drugs are powerful enough that you don't really remember what happened.
If you want to look at it qualitatively, I would argue that there are a wide variety of different types of rapes, and an equally wide variety of different types of forced drug consumption. So I'm not sure you can even compare within the same category.
But what I primarily meant when I said they were comparable is that one should approach them both from a similar normative ethical perspective.
> Why?
* People are dosed with medicine all the time without their consent, or rather with parental consent or others acting as guardians. Rape .. not so much.
* And visceral reasons that I acknowledge are not logical but are very real to me: rape is _the_ crime I loathe most of all.
It is the most painful thing to watch your child make a mistake. But to help them learn from it and avoid it in the future is worth it.
It is even better when they don't make mistakes. Sadly, kids are small versions of their parents.
But, when they are 18, 21, etc., they will have developed more mentally and emotionally, and should (should) be better equipped to make those decisions than when one is 12.
(note: in this post I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the topic at hand, just providing a counterpoint to what you said)
Your argument pales in comparison to what the state teaches.
Just to give you one example.
It's ok to mold truth into whatever your political needs are. I.e. how the western countries basically hand picked data to claim that Saddam had WMD
Games aren't isolated silos anymore. They are social spaces where the same issues we deal with in our every day life unfolds. To claim that the game mechanics or the game theme is the moral compass is simply missing the point.
How easily we seem to be willing to trade freedom for comfort when we agree with what's traded. Certainly I wouldn't want a 12 year old's perception of reality to be entirely shaped by video games, but that falls to sound parenting and not the government.
That being said - I'm not entirely sure I even agree with your premise, I grew up on Doom, Wolfenstein, etc which were graphically violent for their time and have turned into a successful well rounded "moral" person.
The real question is, can the government legislate this morality? How much protection is the legislated-upon action given by the Constitution, and how restrictive is that actual legislation?
Now theoretically you could go a layer deeper and suppose that those natural rights are themselves based on a certain group or culture's morality judgement, although that would be contradictory to their essence as "natural"
Governments kill people all the time, and do so quite legally.
Some governments do it more than others. But, as far as the US government is concerned, it happens to have the one of the world's largest contingent of hired killers. And they spend more money than all of the rest of the world combined to train them to kill and to facilitate killing and on giving them the means to do so.
And this doesn't even begin to cover the vast array of other people and situations in which killing is not only permitted, but considered a duty -- from police killing a some suspect trying to get away or resisting arrest to your average homeowner killing an intruder in their home, etc..
So when you talk about "laws against killing", you're really talking about "laws against certain kinds of killing in certain kinds of situations" and also "laws that specifically allow or even require killing in certain situations".
While most societies do have laws against "murder", what that usually boils down to is "certain kinds of illegal killing". Precisely what qualifies as "illegal killing" and what in which situations killing is allowed or even encouraged varies from society to society and certainly from individual to individual (take pacifists and believers in non-violence vs soldiers for example).
Exactly this.
I recently found out that my 10 year-old was viewing online porn on my computer. I didn't go out and start lobbying the government to make porn illegal; instead I sat down with him and had a talk about it without freaking out.
The legality of any given act and how I want my kids to consider it are two completely different things. I think violent/sexual video games should be completly legal, but my kids won't be playing them (well, not in this house anyway :-) until I think they're ready.
It's the parents responsibility. Plain and simple.
More than likely if the parents don't care if the children play it, odds are they're not doing a lot of things as a parent. It's not the responsibility of the government to become parents. Look at the mess they've made trying to do that with other things that obviously don't work, the drug war for instance.
These two aren't even remotely related. Legislating morality is great for legislators, not for the citizens.
Do you have any evidence of this (a study, etc)?
Having played video games in my youth (and still dabble), I don't believe that it's affected my "moral compass."
In fact many "violent" video games are chucked full of ethical dilemmas (e.g. Dragon's Age, Mass Effect, Fallout). You're confronted by choices that have consequences. As a 15 year old in America, how many complex moral/ethical choices do you really get?
So, to lump in all games into one category b/c of violence or sex or whatever is ridiculous.
lots
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...
"Prolonged exposure to such media portrayals results in increased acceptance of violence as an appropriate means of solving problems and achieving one's goals.14,,15 "
It then spends several paragraphs treating the conclusions of these studies done in a very different era as a modern given.
And later: "Research has associated exposure to media violence with a variety of physical and mental health problems for children and adolescents, including aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, fear, depression, nightmares, and sleep disturbances. More than 3500 research studies have examined the association between media violence and violent behavior; all but 18 have shown a positive relationship.26"
Look at the title of #26 and honestly tell me you'd trust its claims if you had access to it.
I don't know if I want to keep going with this. It doesn't seem worth the effort with how shoddy it is so far.
because it violates your local social norms? What if I changed it to "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Smoke: A Call to Action Against Cigarettes and Smokeless Tobacco"?
No, shitty parents develop shitty moral compasses. Take your pick about shitty information sources: TV, video games, the internet, trashy magazines/newspapers. If that's where you learn about normalcy, you're going to have a shitty moral compass.
Yes, there are also cases of great parents having shitty kids, parenting is a complicated and messy business. My point is that if you can actually say one source (e.g. video games) is developing a child's moral compass, that's shitty parenting.
This is also not a community safety issue until I see the study that shows a statistically significant change toward aggressive/violent behavior in children who play violent video games.
This is the thing you're not getting. It is not moral to impose morality by force (except if it is being imposed on you by force).
The directors of the corporation are jailed.
That's the force.
I for one don't agree with what most people do in my community, and most everywhere around the world. Not that I'm a saint who never cheats, lies or steals, but I am true, I don't pretend I'm someone I'm not, and I don't much care about looks, money, fame and other irrelevant things in life. Most people around me do the opposite, and care only about their perceived status in the group, would sell a friend for pennies, and pretend they care, but never really listen. I filter most of these people out of my life, and don't have many true friends that I would spend a lot of time with.
This only makes me more motivated to instill really strong moral values in my future children.
Somehow, she managed even with the existence of and playing of (gasp) video games! And with such shitty parents that didn't have a well-meaning bureaucrat telling us what to do.
THE HORROR.
I find it extremely distasteful that the state thinks it can raise my children better than I can, and that it can decide what bad/good parenting is. That being said, obviously some parents are bad parents (by most standards), and would allow their kids to play very violent games, but a prohibition like this would do nothing to prevent this (bad parents would find innovative ways to raise their children in a bad way).
To give a similar example: from a very early age, I was taught how to properly consume alcohol by my parents (through moderation), not by the state (through prohibition). And I find such laws, e.g. in the US where kids are not allowed even to drink alcohol, ridiculous.
Like in your Ativan example. Those who chose to dope the subject didn't actually think about their action, but instead made a decision based on emotional response. Part of the purpose of the exercise was to teach them to consider the implications of their actions and then make a proper decision that could be defended at a later point in time.
If we spent more time teaching children subjects like philosophy they would be better prepared to consider their actions and the effects of media and peers would be greatly diminished. I think in the long run our society would be better served by this path than by a attempted (and most likely failed) removal of negative media.
You know, I think it depends on the message, not the medium. Books as a whole are an unreliable source of training, but there are some that we take seriously. I think great literature is better training than experience, as it reflects great insight.
You could say the same thing about movies, to a lesser degree. Some are 007, and some are Shawshank Redemption. I've heard of college level ethics courses being taught by watching and discussing heavy movies, and I don't think that's inappropriate.
Gaming as a genre is pretty young; it's only just beginning to cross the threshold of serious art. I think it has the potential to be serious literature as well; the single player mode of Starcraft 2, for example, struck me as though it was attempting to actually grapple with serious issues related to warfare -- and unique to games, it did so by asking the player to make serious choices. I won't say it crossed the threshold of great literature, but I will say it was heading that way.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...
It is not violence itself but the context in which it is
portrayed that can make the difference between learning
about violence and learning to be violent. Serious
explorations of violence in plays like Macbeth and films
like Saving Private Ryan treat violence as what it is—a
human behavior that causes suffering, loss, and sadness
to victims and perpetrators. In this context, viewers
learn the danger and harm of violence by vicariously
experiencing its outcomes.
Certainly, it makes the point that taken as a whole, media like television and video games don't treat violence well, and hence if you track how much kids are watching without being concerned about what, you see negative consequences. And I'd certainly agree with that. But I don't think such an average figure merits demonization of the medium as a whole.
I still think the crucial point is whether you're writing about and exploring life; whether you're doing philosophical teaching -- in a word, whether you're consuming literature -- or whether it's just entertainment. I hold that the vast majority of works in any medium are just entertainment, but that there are worthwhile ones, even in video games.
I think that we could be doing everyone a favor if there was more education in ethics starting at a younger age. I don't necessary mean "philosophy" classes, discussing teleology and things like that, because I don't think that would have any effect and students would space out like they do in any other class. But I would want an education that directly addresses ethics: posit a situation to your students (preferably one that they can be familiar with at their age, at least to begin with), and then open a discussion. Young students are not very enthusiastic about class discussions, but I think by putting them in a situation like this, someone will say something because they disagree, and that will get the ball rolling.
I feel like adults making unethical decisions do so because they don't truly understand personhood, because they've never had an education in it. Because they don't understand why a captive has right not to be drugged, even if it could mean that they don't get tortured (or at least, why you as a doctor have the right and/or duty not to drug them).
I don't know that I agree that videogames mess up children's moral compasses and I don't think that restricting them would do any good (as an example, take the War on Drugs). But I think that a mandatory discussions in ethics every couple of years (as the children grow up and face new sets of problems) could do a world of good.
The problem is that the believe they have developed their moral compass. So, when faced with real questions, they proceed with confidence when they should have deep doubts about their own abilities and proceed with the utmost caution instead. A Duning-Krueger effect.
That doesn't seem to be the point of your anecdote at all. You just magically created a correlation between the anecdote you started with and your suggestion that "video game violence develop a shitty moral compass".
If it is normal to sedentarily stare at a pixellated screen, it does not matter what is on the screen; you may appeal to whichever emotions you choose. Conversely, I would not particularly want to see my child grow up without a healthy respect for other people's freedom, and this seems to represent a greater danger when they are going to join the ranks of the voting public. Is it not equally void that a child should be forced to grow up under the spectre of some cult such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or similar nonsense? Violent video games and pornography pale in comparison.
>Preview of that statement: "The strength of the correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior found on meta-analysis is greater than that of calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection, or environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer."
From the article:
>Playing violent video games has been found to account for a 13% to 22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior; by comparison, smoking tobacco accounts for 14% of the increase in lung cancer.
This is one of the most misleading and intellectually dishonest statements I have ever had the misfortune of reading. It is true that an average tobacco smoker has approximately a 14% lifetime chance of developing lung cancer (it is closer to 17% for males and 12% for females), but this is absolutely not equivalent to a 14% increase in the chance of developing lung cancer. Rather, a nonsmoker has approximately a 1.5% chance of developing lung cancer: a smoker has nine times as large a chance to develop lung cancer as a nonsmoker. This is not a 14% "increase" in the same sense of a "13-22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior". It is an 800% increase! To assert that these risk factors are in any way similar is completely absurd and raises serious questions about your motivations.
>condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection
In reality, the chance of HIV transmission in the case of unprotected vaginal sex is 1 in 1000. Considering the severity of the disease, this is absolutely not an acceptable risk, but it is kind of laughable to see this phrase so wildly bandied about.
>[rambling story about the CIA]
>Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. It's just shit. I don't care if it points in the right direction or the wrong direction. I, your comrade in arms, don't know where it's going to point next time. And that's not the guy I want be sharing a tent with.
I fail to see how your argument supports your conclusions. Rather, it seems to show that a lack of education is what leads to poor moral decisions, not exposure to violent video games. The people in your example were not stratified on the grounds of having played Grand Theft Auto, they were stratified on the grounds of having some knowledge of ethics and morality, the latter having basically nothing to do with Grand Theft Auto.
Let me tell you a story. It is an ancient story, and it is highly relevant.
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?" asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe," Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play," Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
If you want a society of people that understands values, you have to teach values. You cannot hope for them to arise on their own by simply depriving them of whatever you consider a corrupting influence.
>So enjoy your expanded access to an audience willing to pretend they understand violence. Moral consistency matters. Reliability matters. You can look forward to further international embarrassment when they grow up to make the wrong, randomly wrong, decisions behind the trigger or, worse, at the voting booth.
Hopefully they won't make the same mistakes as you.
I think we agree that you have to do both: teach values and fight corrupting influences.
My guess is that as a father of 9 kids and a grand-father of even more, he's seen firsthand how nominal an impact video games have on minors.
In my experience, the most vocal opponents of violence in video games don't actually have any video-game playing children of their own.
Outsiders might not realize it but not all "conservatives" are cut from the same cloth. There is a rich and diverse right-wing ideological taxonomy.
The constitution doesn't specifically address either, yet nudity can absolutely be regulated (or according to Scalia completely banned) while violence is just fine.
Though he dissented in Bond (2000), the combination of those two rulings may give fairly powerful protections against technological surveillance.
If that was true, surely he would have to believe that the 1st amendment forbids federal copyright laws?
First, inventors and authors frequently aren't the ones who hold exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries under copyright law, as their rights are often signed over to others; and these rights are often continued to be held even after the authors and inventors die.
Second, there weren't any movies or videos or even recordings back when the US Constitution was written, so their writings couldn't possibly directly apply to these media.
It takes interpretation on the parts of these supposed "constitutional originalist" justices to decree that these new media do in fact fall under copyright law.
http://www.lawsofplay.com/articles/justice-scalias-opinion-o...
"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones."
Opinion (direct link): http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf [PDF]
7One study, for example, found that children who had just finishedplaying violent video games were more likely to fill in the blank letter in “explo_e” with a “d” (so that it reads “explode”) than with an “r” (“explore”). App. 496, 506 (internal quotation marks omitted). The prevention of this phenomenon, which might have been anticipated with common sense, is not a compelling state interest.
This is good for everyone, now games can avoid becoming comic books all over again.
Instead, the Roth test for obscenity was "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest"
I find it disgusting that after all this time, we're still using a moral-ethics based approach to determine whether a broad ranging law can apply to a specific form of media. It is not that I particular agree or disagree with whether minors should have access to this - but I do disagree on how this decision has been made.
I'm hoping that with this decision, we'll be forced to reconsider how expressions are perceived.
For instance, why do we value free speech? Because we believe that free speech is a human right. This is a moral belief. If a dictator says "I don't believe free speech is a right," I might argue that society functions better with it.
But the dictator doesn't care how well society functions, in terms of outcomes for other people; he only cares about his own power. In the end, my argument would be that people have rights that "shouldn't", in a moral sense, be violated.
And that is exactly what the United States' founders said - "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
It should be pretty clear to any strict constitutionalist that what's being laid out there is not a moral, inherent right to carry arms but a means to an end. Yes, there is a moral judgement in that it's worth doing things to preserve a free state, but it's several times removed from the actual question being addressed.
I always wondered about that though, since I remember hearing about a case that was overturned because the defense was able to show that the number of adult pay-per-view purchases in the area far exceeded the number of subscriptions to their website. Also (since I'm a developer and not a lawyer), I'd really like to know why it should even matter what the community standards in, say, Salt Lake City are if the website is based and hosted in California.
I would still say that in that case, freedom of expression must be balanced against the community's moral standards. That may be vague, but it's real; I think there would be a pretty broad consensus among parents of all religious stripes, for example, that they don't want such billboards up where their children would see them.
What the case came down to was whether violence can be treated the same way as sex. Ginsberg v. NY, a case from the 60s, gave an exception to the normal obscenity test--media could be regulated if it depicted sex and was sold to minors. Ginsberg v. NY, however, didn't touch on violence, and the issue was whether Ginsberg v. NY is content-specific, and only limited to sex, or whether the fact that that decision hinges upon harm done to youth means that other media that harm youth, ie, through exposure to violence, can be included in the exception. And, as you guys may guess, the trouble comes from the fact that damage can't really be shown.
That being said, if it was ruled Constitutional, I wouldn't have a problem with this law. Community values should reinforce parental values. There is a reach to what parents can do and control, everyone knows that.
Just my opinion.
Growing up in the heart of this ESRB rating era, I can honestly say I was rarely if at all effected. Like a lot of kids, if I wanted a Mature game, I'd get an adult to buy it in the same way kids buy booze. It wasn't a real deterrent and at the end of the day I was still playing the games that I wasn't supposed to. Right or wrong, doing dumb things, and seeing the world that you're not supposed to is just another rite of childhood and growing up. The only thing this new amendment really does is it makes things easier for kids--psh the kids today have it so easy.
I don't know much about 1st ammendment law, but aren't mature books and movies regularly prohibited to be sold to minors? I thought porn couldn't be sold to kids? Or is it merely a suggestion?
I'm not sure about porn, but I skimmed this ruling and it makes frequent reference to how obscenity laws are a special case where speech may be prohibited, so it might be different.
I remember being turned away from a ticket counter for that.
Now that the law -can't- exist, will the self-policing continue?
There is likely good business incentive to keep the policy. If parents can be confident their children will be barred from movies they'd want to forbid, they'll be more likely to send them to the theater, give them cash to see movies, etc. The MPAA probably gathers enough data & does enough market research to have some sense of whether or not this outweighs the increased revenue from teenagers seeing more adult fare.
[1] Brief history: http://www.lehigh.edu/~infirst/moviecensorship.html